Other People Have Horrible Taste But NOT ME

Harlan Ellison, Super Genius:

Polishing the Hammer

It's Not So Bad

Henry and Glenn Forever

Since a certain Bastard has yet again made fun of Glenn Danzig, I suppose it's worth someone's while to point out Henry and Glenn Forever.



And of course an image search will net you much more.

Art Spiegelman CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps

The Art Spiegelman show at the VAG was very much worth seeing. It's been bunches of places already I think, but it was worthwhile especially for illustrations of the planning that goes into Spiegelman's stuff, which seems to be driven by fear of being revealed as worthless. Made me feel healthy!

I was an early buyer of Arcade and I figured I'd seen most of the stuff, but the draft pages of Maus (and the composition of the completed pages) were great to see. It made me want to pick up MetaMaus some time.

A negative is the amount of standing and concentrating you have to do to get the most out of the show: reading comics isn't that much of an ordeal. And the later things seem to lack the smudgy charm of the earlier ones.

Stereotypical Behaviour

Go, my pet! Find the zombie!

ATTACK!

ALSO:



TIME TO KILL UPDATE:

The typical goatse reaction demonstrated in three species:

Jack "King" Kirby

Reading back through Kirby's stuff it's obvious that people are still stealing from him.

Boring Enough to Sleep To

Let's see if this works. It required a fairly crazy amount of cutting and pasting in the tag salad that YouTube provides: that was much more painful than making a sound, getting a half-minute of it, fading it in and out, then adding a picture to it to make sure YouTube would take it, then exporting it to a format YouTube would take, then uploading it.

The deal is I was always impressed with the Hunter S. Thompson trick of turning the TV channel - remember turning the things? - in between stations to get white noise to sleep to. The thing is that while white noise provides a lot of sound cover, it's the same sound from moment to moment, and if you're in the insomniac way then your mind is racing. If you use some hippie-style synth drones, though, the sound can get to this happy balance between enough variance to be distracting but not quite enough variance to be rousing.

Lately I've been letting this go all night: it's around Hallowe'en and here that means fireworks season. Not that we take anything away from The Lovely Daughter's ability to make crashing noises.











Neato! Works fine. They're all timed a little bit differently so once they get out of phase they shouldn't line up again for...too much math. Plus there are bound to be load-time issues.

BWOF!

Hmm, don't think the divs work for that, so drag and drop it is.

The Mother of All Elections

Dan Coyle was kind enough to point us at Gary Graham:

Say goodbye now, before it gets too obvious. But don’t let them know you’re saying goodbye. Just invite them out to lunch or over for a barbecue. Or meet for coffee … just casual … no big deal.

Nobody need know that it’s really a bit of a farewell. They may get over it … after a decade or so … and your friendship can resume. But I speak from the experience of one who has lost many, many "close, personal friends" after Presidential elections.

What? You're from Iraq?

Liberal friends, that is.

Ha ha, no. See, all the conservatives were sent to the FEMA camps and gassed to death. Lampshades for all! All who are left! Also the cafeterias are 250% more interesting. It's a shame that the rivers have all turned to blood: I blame GLOBAL WARMING.

You see, after November 6, your Liberal friends are not going to want to speak to you. President Barack Obama is going to go down in defeat and forever be known as the one-term failure who against all odds, managed the impossible: He usurped Jimmy Carter’s ironclad title of "Worst President in History."

Fuck book learning! You will wonder how I was able to call this.

And your Liberal friends are going to blame you.

Their vitriol and disgust with you will be veiled. Creepily polite. In fact, their bending over backwards to prove to you that they, being unapologetic Liberals, are so open-minded and gracious in defeat (even though Mitt Romney, or course, will have stolen the election; for as anyone knows, Republicans can’t win an office unless they steal it) and they will be dripping with sweetness and charity for you, the sadly deluded, yet newly empowered Conservative.

Dastardly liberals are your pals while they have their antichrist in office, but once he's turfed they keep pretending to be your pals! YOU WILL NOTICE.

The charade will require Herculean effort on their part to keep from gnashing their teeth to the nubs, and the general tension arising at this farewell meeting of not discussing the elephant (literally) in the room will be excruciating -- but keep a gentle smile omnipresent and love them graciously and sweetly. And hug them at your departure the hug of someone watching a friend going off to die.

All right, we've had fun so far, but let's get realistic. Gary Graham is oblivious to the fact that people get kind of scared when you invite them over and there in the room is a literal elephant. Of course your liberal guests are polite! They are enviro-communists and love nature and they may smile at the beautiful creature crushing the chandelier against the ceiling, but then they have to step around it to get to the bathroom and they find that nature is in actuality a free market trading physical attributes for Certain Death and THEN they'll regret the Democratic congress prohibiting bazookas.

They of course won’t die.

HA.

But the pain of losing their hope and change, and worse … that newly reignited fear deep, deep down inside of them … that terror of the possibility that everything they’ve been professing with such arrogant condescension all their lives, that certainty of correctness and intellectualism that they’ve clothed themselves in, crowned themselves with, setting them so far above us common sense cretins for decades … that spark of consciousness will threaten them to their core … with the possibility that everything they believe in is total horseshit.

Every election this happens. People understand that because some disappointingly small minority of potential voters has elected a guy that their argument is invalid. No suicide is so tragic as when some new movie tops the American box-office totals and the art world's principles are reset.

And they will leave your life.

Because that Liberal friend ain’t-a-gonna talk to y’all again.

Well… at least not for 8 years.

Perhaps you mistake despair for a seething desire for REVENGE.



UPDATE!

Contra Gary:

Jaynie59

It annoys the hell out of me when people who claim to be conservative also claim they have liberals friends. No, they don't. They may have liberal relatives and co-workers or neighbors they can't avoid but that doesn't make them friends. They're people you have to put up with because you can't avoid them.

No conservative in their right mind would be friends with a liberal. Why would want to be friends with someone who hates this country and every thing it stands for, hates Christianity and believes it is responsible for killing more people in the history of the world than any other philosophy, and honestly and truly wants all conservatives to die slow, painful deaths. Why would you want to be friends with anybody who holds so much hate in them for everything you hold dear?

You don't have any liberal friends. And if you really consider a liberal a good friend, you ain't no conservative.

Savagery

Bananas:

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Friday that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority violated the First Amendment rights of a pro-Israel group when it rejected an advertisement the group wanted to place on city buses on grounds that they contained demeaning language.

The group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, had proposed an ad that said, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.”

Then, between two Stars of David, the ad said: “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

The transportation authority said the ad violated its prohibition on ads that demeaned individuals or groups on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin and five other specific categories. The group was given the opportunity to revise the ad, but it refused, and claimed in a lawsuit that the agency’s “no demeaning” language restriction was unconstitutional.

The judge, Paul A. Engelmayer of Federal District Court, ruled that the rejected ad was “not only protected speech — it is core political speech,” expressing a “pro-Israel perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict” and implicitly calling “for a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy with regard to that conflict.”

As such, the judge held, the ad “is afforded the highest level of protection under the First Amendment.”

The article has more on the rationale, which seems asinine to me. If no government agency can block free speech, however, I assume government employees will be able to say whatever the fuck they want with no consequences, right?

Whoops, wrong link.

The Overkill Window

In a thread over here I made fun of Arnold Kling because he's a libertarian and he looks funny. Now that's hardly fair because I haven't paid attention to what Kling puts out since this ridiculous nonsense. Perhaps I am a very bad person who oh wait a minute:

However, I do not blame the poor results of President Obama's economic policies on lack of trust. The policies that were enacted when Democrats were in control of the House failed because they were wrong-headed, not because of a lack of trust. I understand that there is an alternative narrative in which the situation was worse than President Obama thought, and then the public stupidly voted in a Republican majority in the House in 2010, so nothing else could be done. But I do not see that narrative as having any merit beyond serving as a comforting bedtime story for those on the left.

My narrative would be closer to that of Walter Russell Mead. I view the left as tapped out, both intellectually and financially. They do not have the money to sustain their big projects (government health care, European integration). They do not have the intellectual fortitude to confront the problems inherent in, say, public sector unions, unfunded public sector liabilities, attempting to manage health care resources using government boards, or attempting to address inequality of economic outcomes by increasing the concentration of political power.

Below, Arnold Kling coping just fine with Libertopia:

More Lazyblogging

You may thank your lucky stars that Dr. Mario here did not emerge out of a certain picture with his speech balloon containing "Christ what an asshole."

Old news for colour-vision specialists.

If you don't stop killing our kids we'll kill our kids!

MIRANSHAH: A militant group threatened action on Saturday against anyone conducting polio vaccinations in the region where it is based, saying the healthcare drive was a cover for U.S. spies.

The group, based in North Waziristan and led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, said it had banned vaccinations for as long as U.S. drone aircraft continued to make missile strikes in Pakistan.

It cited the case of Shakil Afridi, the doctor who, Pakistani sources say, helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden through a vaccination drive in the town where he was living.

"As long as drone strikes are not stopped in Waziristan there will be a ban on administering polio jabs," said the group, which is believed to have an unofficial non-aggression pact with the Pakistani military.

Pop quiz: Do you know what Warchild holds in all those pockets? WAR.

Film?

I love this shit:

It wasn't the evil god Loki who defeated the Avengers last week; it was the slippery fingers of a projectionist.

The new film "The Avengers" ran into a glitch at a recent press screening, according to The Verge. The digital file of the movie being readied for the press was accidentally deleted by the projectionist. Though one would hope certain safeguards would be in place to prevent such a hiccup, apparently deleting a digital copy of a film is no different than deleting any other type of file.

No word on why the file couldn't be recovered or why there was no backup. But the press had to wait more than two hours for the film to be downloaded again.

You won't be stumbling around in a vault somewhere discovering a whole bunch of ones and zeros that collectively form a complete copy of Metropolis. Also I support this trolling effort at a bus stop near that place where I buy booze:



I want to correct that graffiti EVERY GODDAMNED TIME I SEE IT. Troll, you have revealed my nature and I am ashamed.

Comics vs. Cool

Yes, this supervillain in disguise - or not in disguise, one or the other - is singing a Travelling Wilburys song which appears to be about smug assholes nearing death.

Is it possible that dreck written by middle-aged white guys now says more to me than it did when I was thirteen?

Posting Videos Counts

Old person music:







This may see some use some day:



That's right, because I'm The One Who Is Nice!

ALSO:

Need Man to Splain

In The Trenches

A battle is being fought, of almost cosmically non-spiritual import:

Just a couple of weeks ago -- the weekend before Thanksgiving, in fact -- the annual Skepticon conference was held ... one of the largest gatherings of atheists and skeptics in the country ... owner of the ice cream shop Gelato Mio ... took offense ... And he put a sign on the door to his shop, reading, quote, "Skepticon is NOT Welcomed To My Christian Business." ...

Dear God!

So what happened?

Atheists brought the nuclear smackdown.

Someone took a photo of the sign, and within minutes it was Facebooked, Tweeted, G-plussed, texted, blogged, emailed, and probably sent by smoke signals and carrier pigeon. It raced through the atheosphere like a wildfire on meth. Gelato Mio was inundated with angry calls and emails; their ratings on Yelp and UrbanSpoon sank to the basement; on UrbanSpoon, their "most popular menu item" was quickly voted as "Bigotry."

...

And Drennan apologized.

Gelato for all atheists is secured!

Atheists will not be fucked with.

I dunno, maybe I should be more sympathetic to my godless brethren, but, uh, okay, this is the title of the article:

2 Shocking Attacks on Atheism -- And How Atheists Fought Back

No, not really seeing the "not to be fucked with" cred there. Or the shock or the attack for that matter...

UPDATE!

My error. Turns out the guy who ran the gelato place was ADOLF HITLER and he was working on a Pan-Skeptic Gelato Removal Ray*. Seems the ray itself was three seconds from bathing the continent in unearthly treat-denying radiation from its orbital platform when Glasses O'Fingerpoint somehow tweeted the shutdown code through an avalanche of licorice and caramel corn, thus saving the atheist community from potential having-to-think-of-a-different-snack. Also I think the second shocking attack I didn't mention was about a lampshade factory and missing atheists, so my apologies to the families and their little dogs too.

*ACME™ brand parts, may not work on road-runners

Where I Am Now

Yes yes, Canadians dress funny. I've heard it all before.

BEEP! BEEP!

Expect some scheduled posting from tomorrow until around mid-month, with intermittent liveness. Road tripping. Vehicle pictured below: